Shogunworld: For those for whom Westworld is not enough, the true connoisseur of gore can indulge their fantasies with the slash of a katana. Modeled after Japan’s Edo period, Shogun World offers a chance for guests to embrace their inner warrior, in a landscape of highest beauty and darkest horror. Let your true self take shape in the land where self-discovery is an art form.

That was a mixed bag. The Raj World was clever idea. Pick a time and place where the guests can be aristocrats, but with some modern facilities (less rough and ready than Westworld, or Medieval World (if there is one)).

Abernathy is a welcome return, the actor is excellent, I hope he gets more screen time.

Maeve got some good moments and her little group is fun. Welcome back Armistice and the technicians!!!

But it wasn’t a great episode. The security force assault was really incompetent. Those guys might fail the entrance exam to be Imperial Stormtroopers!

I don’t feel like anyone’s heart was in it this week. The writing, the direction, even the action, they were all below the usual standard.

Certainly this season ain’t last season. I’ve said before they’ve become deliberately obtuse and it’s getting in the way of the show, but this crawling plot with minor reveals isn’t good TV. Even when Lost was up to this crap 10 years ago they’d add more meat to the bones. I’m not sure if this season is going to turn things around, it’s starting to feel like watching the Walking Dead.

Slow burn - I hope. Now that Westworld is broken, time to get out of Westworld. Okay, we see the Raj and some Ghost Dancers. And at the end a samurai. Apparently the program is spreading across the park proper. At a leisurely rate. I’m wondering if last weeks proximity between the female leads was to pass that database (that seems to act like a collective subconscious, which, if they go there, is more than a bit weird).

That’s not interesting though. You get 5 minutes of ohh, a ninja or ohh, a tiger but that’s not storytelling.

The park can put people in any environment they want, fully immersive worlds, and they offer Westerns, fucking British India and Samurai. No wonder they needed funding.

I think hammering out the background in this show is going to destroy it, like with Lost. It’s a magic trick where what’s going on is part of the fabric of the experience and at the end of the day there’s not enough there. Like Battlestar Galactica as well.

That sentence hurts, Miqque. The Rajworld bit was great because it was showcasing the break from the POV of a survivor. They really missed a step with this show by completely bypassing the interesting aspect of Westworld being Proto-Jurassic Park.

Eh it’s not like S1 was great to begin with… but I think I prefered the more constrained setting of only WW, and not all those other parks… it’s getting silly already and they’ve barely scratched them…

Anyways, there’s a LOT of things that I don’t get… I don’t remember if they were explained at some point…

So first of all: What DID happen to the hosts? I’m under the impression they got “set free”… but what does that even mean and entail? Maeve and Dolores seem to be very different than the rest of the hosts…

Second, wtf is up with the gun incosistency?? How can hosts even kill the humans since the guns are supposed to magically explode robots but don’t hurt humans (how does that even work btw??)

Seriously, I really don’t care who lives or dies. Both the humans and the hosts are unsympathetic assholes. It feels like something went wrong with the characterization this season.

Personally, I think Person of Interest did a better job of exploring artificial intelligence than Westworld has so far. The show is boring and getting damn close to becoming tedious.

Assuming the Delos parks that we know about were real and functioning properly and I had the money, I don’t think I would go. The themes we’ve seen so far don’t interest me. Knowing myself very well, what the parks offer hold no appeal for me.

Seriously, I really don’t care who lives or dies. Both the humans and the hosts are unsympathetic assholes. It feels like something went wrong with the characterization this season.

That’s what I was feeling, right up until the end of this episode when Teddy was still Teddy. That gave me a character I could still like, as well as opening up interesting questions of exactly how much hosts can move out of character now, and what is dictating how much much old programming is or isn’t still there.

That gave me a character I could still like, as well as opening up interesting questions of exactly how much hosts can move out of character now, and what is dictating how much much old programming is or isn’t still there.

It’s a fuzzy issue, I think the hosts are mostly carrying on from the last version of themselves, but they have the capacity to grow and change.

Maeve was engineered to be proactive and now she’s making her own choices based on that. Dolores was turned into the Dolores/Wyatt hybrid so that’s how she’s going to go forward. Both of them were set to be ruthless about what they want, but Maeve seems to have a bit more of a conscience.

Teddy is still in love with Dolores, but now he’s having to deal with her shift of personality. Either he’ll become the sort of ruthless character who can back her up in the long run, or they’re heading for a split.

The only character I care about this season, seriously, is Teddy. He is still following Dolores like a loyal puppy, but his deeper programming (or is it a conscience?) keeps telling him that what she is doing is wrong, so he is starting to perform some small acts of rebellion.